AI news brief: Phase is a newly launched blockchain that lets smartphone users earn tokens by helping run AI services. Unlimit founder Kirill Eves has committed $45 million in funding, and Phase says it has no outside investors. The money covers the first two years of development plus a two-year operating buffer. Phase also launched Phase …
AI news brief: J.P. Morgan Asset Management data shows hyperscaler capex has overtaken free cash flow, and valuations look rich relative to the S&P 500. Jordi Visser, a former Morgan Stanley managing director and CIO of Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers who now runs 22V’s AI Macro Nexus Research, argues that AI agents will let users direct software to execute trades and other financial actions, which for crypto is like the App Store or the smartphone. Agent adoption should drive activity in tokenized assets and crypto payments, so the opportunity isn’t limited to the companies supplying compute. His own holdings have expanded from bitcoin, ether and Solana to a broader basket of tokens…
AI news brief: Dan’s Steaks in Singapore, run by former radio DJ Daniel Ong, is a restaurant chain that survived the COVID-19 pandemic and kept serving juicy steaks to hungry Singaporean diners. Now it has been brought down by another force beyond its control: inflation. The owner says rising operating costs are the reason for closing, and the chain is expected to shut down in the coming months…
AI news brief: Japanese adult English learners widely believe human teachers remain irreplaceable, even though many of them already use generative AI themselves, according to a Nikkei poll. The survey targeted adult English learners in Japan, many of whom use generative AI tools at least part of the time to support their studies, but most still feel the role of human teachers can’t be replaced by AI. The report cites online English teaching platform RareJob, noting that many students who study with AI materials are actually more eager to seek out opportunities to learn from human teachers.
AI News Brief: Zoom recently announced that enterprise users will be able to verify that the person on the other end of a video call isn’t an AI deepfake through a ‘Proof of Human’ badge. The biometric technology was developed by World, the company backed by Sam Altman, and the system is called ‘World ID for Zoom,’ now live globally on the Zoom Marketplace. It works by cross-checking three pieces of data…
AI News Brief: Anthropic announced it’s setting up a ‘Public Benefit Fund,’ a wholly-owned independent entity within the company aimed at giving it ‘greater flexibility and scale’ to support social good projects. The company is committing 5% of its shares to the fund, with an escalator clause: every time Anthropic’s valuation grows 50%, it’ll kick in another 2% of shares. As for how the money will actually be used, Anthropic has only sketched broad directions so far…
AI news brief: Disney will absorb the majority of Character.AI’s workforce. The chatbot company filed for bankruptcy earlier this week, and it has now emerged that Disney has agreed to hire most of its employees. Character.AI’s former CEO Karandeep Anand had already moved over to become Disney’s first-ever CTO, suggesting the relationship was in the works for a while. Character.AI had also previously agreed to sell some assets to Disney for $20 million, and that deal is still going through legal process.
AI News Brief: Developments in EconomyAI, climate issues, and private capital are revealing growing divergence among Asian economies. As the IMF annual meetings wrapped up in Bangkok, Thailand, participants noted that while Asia has shown considerable economic resilience amid energy supply shocks and a worsening cost-of-living crisis, with overall growth holding up well, that resilience is becoming increasingly uneven — some countries are falling behind because they’ve missed the AI wave and other favorable trends.
AI News Brief: In an interview, Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier noted that the intense US-China rivalry in tech and AI is putting universities under a dual squeeze: they need to keep pace with technological progress and keep research and teaching relevant, while also facing increasingly heavy national security compliance demands. He specifically pointed out that universities must confront the real national security concerns tied to ‘high-risk technology’ and ‘dual-use te…
AI news brief: An internal report released by Anthropic on Friday shows major shifts in the company’s workforce makeup and work patterns over the past year. The share of junior employees in technical roles dropped from 21% to 14%, while junior technical hires fell sharply from 27% to just 9%, signaling a clear pullback in hiring fresh grads. Technical staff also shrank from 61% to 56% of the overall workforce, which the company attributes to business teams growing naturally as the company scales, and to coding tools letting non-technical employees build software on their own.